The last Malty Media radio show (December 30) was a lot better than the previous one - I was worried that we were losing our mojo. Because we were on leave, we did a bit of last minute work, including construction of a drum and bass tribute to Children of the Dog Star, a 'kidult' TV series from the mid 80s, when we was wee bairns. Michael put on an astonishing performance of authentic drum and bass silly/seriousness - for a second there we sounded like something off one of those horrific generic dance music compilation CDs - Ministry of Wank, or whatever. Somehow it was all still good.

This year we plan to get out another EP, or possibly two (actually, three would be good, but that might be pushing it).

The main reason for posting is that today I cleared out several boxes of old tapes and I listened to some stuff I did in the mid-late 1990s. This is a period that is quite painful for me because I did a lot of music under the name "Steve Satori" that was fitfully amusing but generally technically poor and often pretty dumb. Anyway, the tracks I listened to today were 'unreleased' (as in, not on demo compilations) tracks I'd created in early 1998 when getting to grips with my then-new Akai S2000 sampler.

Now these tracks aren't especially brilliant, but nor are they outright awful. Part of the reason I ditched them (as best I can dimly remember) was that the sample disks (flopppieees!!!!) got corrupted. In truth the tracks are much too long, much too downbeat, and lack the slick production twists demanded of electronica 'producers' both then and now. What was more intriguing was that the style was something I eventually ditched altogether, and it was quite odd listening to stuff that was kind of familiar, that I knew I'd created, yet were completely unlike anything I'd done for a long time.

Synth solos... no way! More than two chords per track? Whaaaat? Slim Whitman samples? Huh?? Hardly stellar stuff, yet out of these ashes, perhaps a bit of dignity is reclaimed.

What's perhaps funnier is how out of touch I was with anything going on in electronic music at the time. It's not really surprising that it took another five years to get me out of the bedroom and into performing. Embarrassing times, but as I say, there's just enough of a sense of art in those tracks that I just can't reject them outright.